Autobiography 1997 The First One Hundred
By Jerome Rothenberg
1 Archipelago of the wandering dream
2 A castle with two bodies
3 The figure of Rosa Luxemburg among the animals in cages
4 Midnight forest
5 Trains circling below the icy waters
6 A meeting in the bourse
7 The men come into the small locker room & order drinks
8 Picasso wears a hat with roses
9 He has shoes aglow with little lights
10 Electricity runs along the floor & in between the tables
11 Picasso & Rosa Luxemburg converse
12 Her face is the face of our old friend Hannah Weiner
13 “Time is abolished” someone says “the world is o’er”
14 Letters dance into the infinite
15 She wears the infinite around her neck
16 He keeps another infinite inside one earring
17 They live in a world made up of infinites
18 How small a thought it takes to fill the world
19 When we gut up to dance the java it is 5 o’clock
20 Robert Filliou acts the role of Picasso & doesn’t like it
21 It makes us look too small
22 A crowd of diplomats crosses the first rhine bridge
23 There is a place called holy mountain where the ghost of Goebbels wanders
24 Picasso the tap dancer
25 Rosa Luxemburg the temptress on the hill she holds a faded banner
26 A group of soldiers pokes her from the rear
27 A castle opens up
28 The lady with the playing cards is only half familiar
29 I make a phone call to Lynn Lonidier I have to read her book
30 Twice Rosa Luxemburg shows us her breasts
31 Picasso & Paul Blackburn are throwing a ball back & forth
32 It hits Zukofsky who calls out in pain “they hit the poet”
33 A ladder hangs in space
34 I climb it & look down
35 The soldiers of the revolution block every street
36 A line of cars reaches the Seine
37 Tomorrow when you go shopping bring back some cheese
38 Exchange the news with the Jabèses
39 I want all my friends to live where I live especially the dead
40 A banquet in a factory
41 The statue of a woman standing with spread legs between her legs a fire
42 A table piled with roasted meats & spirits
43 I ravished you
44 They embraced at length
45 The armies of drunk artists spread out through the forests
46 Children with their throats cut open
47 In a room with photographs tacked to the walls
48 The mouths are packed with gravel
49 They run the women down for pleasure
50 When the earth shakes bulbs drop from the chandeliers
51 An artist trembles in his atelier
52 In the cold air fingers burn & stretch
53 A holy sacrament begins
54 He swallows air & spits out fire
55 The gardens drop their leaves the leaves crack under foot
56 The carnival comes rushing by
57 We watch it from a window in the bombed-out town
58 My fist is beating on a stranger’s vest
59 The forest comes alive with sounds of cuckoos
60 Clocks & death our password
61 In the night George Oppen still a soldier guards our house
62 Disney among the metaphysicals
63 Picasso in the Louvre hiding with his loot
64 We are all too human
65 She was not the first victim nor will she be the last
66 Napoleon standing on the altar of the world
67 The battle is engaged
68 The beasts in the fountain cry with pain
69 December is the cruelest month
70 There is an avant-garde that cannot be defeated
71 Robert Duncan rides his elevator up to heaven
72 It drops us back to earth
73 The airplane rushes blindly up the city streets
74 Find me a place to hide and I will love you dearly dearly
75 Here is a beer hall called the Holy Ghost
76 My socks in tatters
77 A geranium
78 The way to rub out wine stains is to pour on salt
79 A soldier with a line of watches on each arm
80 The rat inside the lion’s cage
81 Someone follows someone up the hill & stops
82 “Why shouldn’t we be a live?” he asks & no one answers
83 She has a stone to mark her grave her friend has none
84 Christ in a woman’s dress with hefty boobs
85 I might have known it
86 He pours a black blob on the sheet & blows on it until it dries
87 The circle of their friends draws closer
88 The retrieval of a body in the early dawn
89 It is an accident of weather
90 From too much the process leads into a dearth of themes
91 My country is an amphitheater
92 A peacock bed pharaoh the lord of Egypt
93 A nickel flattened by a trolley spreading lead across the street
94 They slide the body back onto the bed & leave
95 Down in the restaurant a sailor lying on a table sleeping
96 Steps with blue messages are everywhere
97 Blue tambourine blue nails blue poppy seeds blue powdered hair
98 Too tardy & too premature for god
99 Tell Rosa Luxemburg to wait for Monday
100 It is eight a.m. in Paris